After winning the Playlin Player's Choice award I've noticed an uptick in players as well as some people sharing videos on YouTube which has been fun. I've got a few thousand people playing every day.
I just launched user accounts today so user's can now track their progress across devices and share their stats with each other. This ended up being a bigger chunk of work than I expected but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. (Though I launched it 15 minutes ago so I'm holding my breath for bug reports)
I'm fine-tuning my internal puzzle-building now with the goal of letting people use them to make and share their own puzzles soon!
I can't say I'm a regular user but a while ago I stumbled upon another post about tiledwords while a loved one was in the hospital and it was a fun and welcome distraction to solve some of the puzzles together while stuck in an otherwise grim environment.
Thanks for making this and I wish you all the success in the future.
I love tiled words, I've actually been doing the daily puzzle for a while, have completed over a 100 of them! It's part of my morning routine :)
I'm not sure if it would fit the theme, but sometimes I end up searching what an expression means, or where does it come from. Maybe it would be cool to have a little info box after you discover what the word is. Just an idea! Not sure if it would clutter things, and you can always search it yourself, but something I've been thinking about. I still remember looking up peanut gallery and sand dollar!
I've been enjoying Tiled Words! I find myself playing in a weird way, by totally ignoring the clues. I look at the title and try to puzzle out all the answers myself. I don't know if I'm alone in that, but it could be a neat mode to have a setting to hide the clues.
this is so cool, i liked the musical instruments one!
would be super interested to hear more about the puzzle-making process too, is it fully automated with AI at this point or is there still a good amount of manual work and fine-tuning involved?
bookmarked already, can't wait to play tomorrow again
It’s a lot of manual work right now. I don’t use AI in the process. I think it could help with some of the brainstorming but I kind of like the human connection of making a puzzle and having people solve it.
Here’s the basic process.
My wife and I do this part together:
- Think of a theme
- Think of words related to that theme, ideally with a second meaning
- Think of clues for those words
Once we have a good set of clues I plug them into a program I wrote to make crosswords.
The program isn’t that smart. It tries making random crosswords. I run it 1500 times and then sort the results to get the best ones. This brute force approach works pretty well for how simple it is.
I pick the crossword I want and then I use another tool to split up and rearrange the tiles. This step could probably be automated but there’s some finicky logic to the best way to split up the tiles and it goes pretty fast manually.
I’ve been meaning to make a video of the process! I’ll share it here when I do
Congratulations on the award and the user accounts launch! A few thousand daily players as a solo founder is genuinely impressive traction.
Curious about the user-created puzzles feature you're working toward - that's a classic community moat play. Once players can make and share puzzles, your distribution essentially scales with your most engaged users.
I'm building ad-vertly.ai - marketing agents for solo founders. One thing I find fascinating with puzzle/game products is that the word-of-mouth loop is already there (people share scores, show friends), but it rarely gets deliberately amplified. Are you doing anything intentional to capture that organic sharing energy, beyond the stats sharing you just built?
https://tiledwords.com
After winning the Playlin Player's Choice award I've noticed an uptick in players as well as some people sharing videos on YouTube which has been fun. I've got a few thousand people playing every day.
I just launched user accounts today so user's can now track their progress across devices and share their stats with each other. This ended up being a bigger chunk of work than I expected but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. (Though I launched it 15 minutes ago so I'm holding my breath for bug reports)
I'm fine-tuning my internal puzzle-building now with the goal of letting people use them to make and share their own puzzles soon!